Bonum Certa Men Certa

Indifference or Even Hostility Towards Patent Quality Results in Grave Injustice



European Digital SME AllianceSummary: The patent extravaganza in Europe harms small businesses the most (they complain about it), but administrative staff at patent offices only cares about the views of prolific applicants rather than the interests of citizens in respective countries

THE Battistelli/Campinos-run EPO is a blatant, shameless promoter of software patents in Europe, as we last noted earlier today. Similarly, the new USPTO Director is hostile towards 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 because he has long been an advocate of software patents. He made money from litigation, just like Michael Borella who earlier today promoted the rigged 'panels' that merely discredited the US Senate. What makes these people so sure that 'dissing' courts/judges is a good idea? It only aggravates them.



"They're an illusion of value (like Ponzi schemes) or simply fake 'assets' that are just a piece of paper courts would spit at."Earlier today Ben Wodecki (IPPro Magazine) wrote about "HEY HI!" (AI) patents -- whatever they actually are; they're usually just bogus, abstract patents. They're an illusion of value (like Ponzi schemes) or simply fake 'assets' that are just a piece of paper courts would spit at.

It certainly seems like UK-IPO is trying to attract dubious applications; it wants patent applications of low quality and drops a big number (€£630 billion) because of "AI patents", which Wodecki was happy to pass on as though it was factual. To quote:

The number of UK patents in artificial intelligence (AI) has grown exponentially and is expected to add €£630 billion to the UK’s economy by 2035, according to a report from the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). The report, which gives an overview of AI patents and patenting by the UK AI sector, showed that the UK’s patent activity related to AI technologies has more than doubled in the last decade.

However, according to UKIPO figures, around 88 percent of AI-related patents first filed in the UK are also protected elsewhere.

The US still dominates globally in the number of AI-related patents, with double the number of patents compared to the UK. The UK sits in a respectable fourth place, behind two multinational offices, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).


What good are these patents though? Here's another way to put it; as a reminder, the UK Supreme Court is no friend of patent extremists [1, 2]. It throws out patents like these and the higher the court is, the more likely it is to do so because at the higher levels corruption and mischief are harder to get away with; so the law is adhered to/respected more often, ratio-wise. Also among the contributing factors: more eyes (scrutiny) due to importance by precedent.

"It certainly seems like UK-IPO is trying to attract dubious applications..."As it turns out, or as patent maximalists put it today, UK Supreme Court judge Lord Justice David Kitchin slaps down this whole "HEY HI!" (AI) hype that's used to justify bogus patents in places that are run by clueless and greedy bureaucrats (like at the EPO). To quote the outline:

UK Supreme Court judge Lord Justice David Kitchin says he is not convinced AI-created works warrant the same IP protection as human creations


The EPO does not seem to care what European judges are saying; instead, the EPO hopes to just replace them all with judges more closely/directly controlled by the EPO. "French ratification of the UPC was pushed through the Senate by rapporteur M. Ronan Le Gleut, who was examiner at the EPO," Benjamin Henrion noted some time ago (we wrote about him before) and another EPO alumnus, Christian Archambeau, moved from the EPO to EUIPO, where both institutions are still 'googlebombing' the term "SMEs". They just try to distract from the harm they cause to these, expediting work that concerns large foreign companies; the UPC would of course cause further harm to SMEs. Over the past month or so, several times per week in fact, the EPO and EUIPO have promoted the same bogus 'study', which they paid for (it invalidates the argument of neutrality or motivation being benign). Earlier today the EPO once again tweeted: "Our joint study with the @EU_IPO shows that the likelihood of experiencing a high-growth period is 17% higher for SMEs that have filed for at east one European IPR."

"The EPO does not seem to care what European judges are saying; instead, the EPO hopes to just replace them all with judges more closely/directly controlled by the EPO."That's based on bad science, just like prior 'studies' they did on SMEs, which are harmed the most. Watch them bragging (warning: epo.org link), even in Twitter this morning, about that stupid "award" of theirs; they reward software patents from foreign giants like Qualcomm and want us to believe that those patents exist for a positive purpose.

"Munich fake injunction [with EP2724461] published," wrote Florian Müller in his blog only a few hours ago, demonstrating that patent quality is a disaster and this results in highly expensive injustice. This is what Qualcomm did:

This is a long-overdue follow-up to a post of two months back on an order by the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Higher Regional Court) granting a motion by Apple to stay the enforcement of Qualcomm's illegitimate (for multiple reasons) Germany-wide injunction over EP2724461 on a "low-voltage power-efficient envelope tracker"--a patent that an opposition panel of the European Patent Office revoked last month because it shouldn't have been granted in the first place, not even in a narrower form (Qualcomm can and likely will appeal that decision). And Judge Lucy H. Koh's landmark FTC v. Qualcomm antitrust ruling came down that same week.

Of all the cases I've watched since I started this blog nearly a decade ago, what went wrong in this Munich case makes it the worst non-standard-essential patent case by a wide margin, just like the district court's Oracle v. Google rulings were the worst in any software copyright case and the Mannheim Regional Court, in 2012, set a negative example for how to handle a standard-essential patent (SEP) case when it totally failed to recognize Motorola Mobility's blatant antitrust violation by seeking to enforce SEPs after initially making bad-faith out-of-this-world royalty demands (a royalty on computers that was effectively more than a 100% royalty rate since Microsoft would have had to pay Motorola more than it typically earned per copy of Windows sold to an OEM). Apart from that, I've certainly seen--and keep seeing--very bad stuff coming out of the Eastern District of Texas on various occasions, but those weren't cases I followed closely.

The regional government of the state of Bavaria published the December 2018 fake injunction ruling, but I still haven't been able to find a public redacted version of the appeals court's order that tears the fake injunction into pieces, so I'm going to publish it here and now (this post continues below the document):


It's not hard to see that an SME would not be able to endure because it's just too expensive. Yet patent extremists from CIPA and Team UPC not only promote the UPC but also software patents. IP Kat (Jonathan Pratt) has just advertised an event in which patent extremists from CIPA promote patents on life and nature. To quote:

CIPA’s annual Life Science Conference is taking place on 11 and 12 November 2019 in Brighton. The conference is an educational and networking event for patent and IP professionals active in the pharma, medical technology and biotechnology sectors. There will be a pre-dinner speech by Lord Kitchin. More information can be found here.


"Intellectual Property Magazine is recruiting a Reporter in its Business Intelligence division," he adds. Some of their writers left. We've noticed. In fact, staff turnover in these think tanks (disguised as "news") seems very high. Many quit and just vanish without notice. Same in MIP and IAM. The patent maximalists in general experience calamity these days.

"One has to wonder if they even care about science at all. They don't."Just over an hour ago IP Kat (Cecilia Sbrolli) wrote some more fluff about "Fourth Industrial Revolution" -- a vague marketing term that the EPO likes to use when it talks about software patents (knowing it cannot use the term "software patents"). To quote the introduction: "A few weeks ago this Kat was pleased to participate in the event "Institutions And Regulation For The Fourth Industrial Revolution" jointly organised by the Liège Innovation and Innovation Institute (LCII), Hoover IP2 (Stanford University), and the Center for Intellectual Property of the University of Gothenburg."

Yeah, so-called 'Intellectual Property' [sic]. One has to wonder if they even care about science at all. They don't.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Next Month 'New Techrights' Turns Two
Next month, on the fourth week, it'll be 2 years since the migration
Online Safety Act Tries to Accomplish the Impossible
All I can say is, "good luck with that!"
Microsoft Windows "Market Share" Measured Around 2.7% in Iraq, Plunges to 6.5% in Saudi Arabia
Microsoft isn't on the agenda in Iraq
 
Brittany Day Entered LLM Slop Into LinuxSecurity.com and Something Hilarious Happened: The Site is "Exploited"
The brainless, effortless copypasta of "slop artists" shows its limits
Links 03/08/2025: Microsoft Exchange 0-day Exploited and Avoidable Nuclear Escalation
Links for the day
Definitely Not a Ponzi Scheme
Bitcoin v Microsoft
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a Billionaires' Lobby
Billionaires that control tech companies
Microsoft Borrows 3 Billion Dollars Per Month, a Company Truly Worth Trillions Would Not Do This
if Windows (and Office) "market share" fell from about 90% to barely 30%, how come Microsoft is now "valued" at 20 times more?
It's Even Worse Than Microsoft Lunduke Puts It; GNOME is SLAPPing Journalists
In our experience, GNOME is so malicious - some elements of it in particular - that it would launch multiple simultaneous SLAPP campaigns not only against journalists but also their spouses
GNU/Linux Adoption Reaches All-Time Highs in Chile, statCounter Indicates
This month marks 4 years since Vista 11 came out (as a fake "leak") and some surveys still measure its adoption at less than 40%
Slop Will Not Change the World
Some of us grow up sooner and leave that nonsense behind (or altogether avoid/skip it)
Gemini Links 03/08/2025: Nostalgia and TOFU
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 02, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 02, 2025
Google Throwing Out the Search Engine With the Bathwater is a Complete and Utter 'Shi---ow' as the Company Drowns in Debt, Layoffs, and Worse
The mainstream media almost never mentions GAFAM debt
Operating Systems' Statistics in New Zealand: GNU/Linux Up, Windows Down to All-Time Lows
Remember all this when the media says that Microsoft became like 10 times more valuable in those 15 years (from 400 billion to 4,000 billion in alleged "worth")
GNU/Linux Share in Sweden Has Doubled Since PewDiePie, A Swede, Recommended It
months ago he moved to GNU/Linux, then told others to consider doing the same
GNU/Linux Hits Record High in Portugal
GNU/Linux picking up in Portugal
Gemini Protocol is Not Dying, It's Growing
When people say things like "Gemini Protocol is dying" the data does not support them
GNU/Linux is Thriving This Summer
It is meanwhile acknowledged, even by Microsoft pushers, that many GNU/Linux PCs will get sabotaged next month
The End of Microsoft's Reign in Spain: Windows Falls to All-Time Lows in Spanish Web Traffic
Windows sank to new lows in Spain
The Bots Never Sleep: In The Weekends, Slopfarms Dominate Google News, Majority of Entries in Google Are Fake Articles About 'Linux'
Google is fast becoming an ocean of plagiarism; the same goes for Google News, which was supposed to have extra quality control
Russia's Yandex Has Caught Up With Bing in Terms of "Market Share"
Microsoft has been firing loads of Bing workers for over 2 years already
Canada: GNU/Linux Up to Records Highs, Windows Down to Record Lows
Microsoft already announcing some plans to shut down Vista 11
Gemini Links 02/08/2025: Transducers in Typed Racket and American ISPs
Links for the day
Links 02/08/2025: Microsoft Already Kills Vista 11 SE, Smartphone Sales Down, Truth Gets "You're Fired!" in the US
Links for the day
Video: The Rise of GNU/Linux and Free Software as Seen by RMS in 2004
DTP's founder argued that when Windows goes below 85% "market share", it'll lose its grip in the monopoly sense
Russia: GNU/Linux Rises to Highest Adoption Level Since Invasion of Ukraine
Moving up in the north
Microsoft's Latest Financial Report: We "Gained" 300 Million Dollars in "Goodwill" and Liabilities Grew by 32 Billion Dollars
Microsoft's debt has reached an all-time high
The Register US = The Register MS
Formerly The Register UK
Weeks After Microsoft Shut Down Its Operations in Pakistan Windows Falls to All-Time Lows
Only less than a month ago it was quietly revealed, based on laid-off staff, that Microsoft shut down in Pakistan
Criminal Behaviour is the Standard Operating Procedure at Microsoft
In the future I'll be able to tell how, when dealing with SLAPPs from Microsofters, their Microsoft services failed me and sometimes even blocked my contacts
GNU/Linux Rises to All-Time Highs in Europe
many people will get fired for buying Microsoft
All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux on the Client Desktop/Laptop, Based on Steam Survey
GNU/Linux rose to 2.89% in Steam
Links 02/08/2025: Blaugust 2025 and "Russia Declares Navalny Memoir ‘Extremist’"
Links for the day
Free Software is Not a Business Model
Go ahead, ask your friend, "how do you plan to monetise your children?"
When (Almost) One-Man Operations Are Disguised as Medium-Sized Companies
the CEO hides in the US (hiding from his ex-wives, 4 daughters from those wives, and Sirius staff that he defrauded)
LLM Slop Harms Real Literature, Real Web Sites, Real Journalism
LLM slop is a parasite and it'll run out of legitimate outputs
Upcoming OSI Scandal Series
The OSI is a rogue actor because it serves Microsoft in exchange for money
Slopwatch: The Issue Persists, But the Consensus in the Media Changes as Google Enrages It With LLM Plagiarism
We've meanwhile assessed the latest output from Linuxiac
Microsoft Actually in Trouble, Microsofters Unable to Obey Judges' Orders
For the second time in a week, Microsofters are unable to obey orders
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 01, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 01, 2025
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Links 02/08/2025: İstanbul Retail Inflation Reaches 42.48%, US FBI Opens Office in New Zealand
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/08/2025: ZFS, LLM Hype, and Fake Modules
Links for the day
Links 01/08/2025: Health, Conflict, and Attacks on Freedom of the Press
Links for the day
Microsoft's Debt Exploded by 15.4 Billion Dollars in the Past 9 Months Alone (Despite All the Layoffs)
As of minutes ago, at 6PM on a Friday, the numbers are made public
Meeting (Webchat) With Maria Arranz Gomez, Florian Grundies, Jürgen Janda and Konstantinos Kortsaris Confronts EPO Management About Breaking Promises and Crushing Workers
The lack of consistent messages suggests plans other than what's advertised and the lack of consultation (secrecy) likewise
Links 01/08/2025: "The Great British Firewall" and U.S. Army Sponsors Palantir
Links for the day
For Second Day in a Row, Top Story in The Register MS is "Microsoft Says"
The editor in chief exercises control over everybody else
LLMs as Attack Method Against Free Software and Programming
DDoS in "hey hi" (slop) clothing
Stability and Reliability, Backward Compatibility
I don't fancy relying on social control media as "sources"
What "the News" Looks Like in 2025
The "says" (or "sez") phenomenon
History Will Be Distorted, Sometimes Intentionally, Under the Guise of Intelligence (Manipulated/Curated Slop)
Militarised misinformation or military-grade chaff is a national security threat, even domestically
Financial Engineering Companies: A Company Worth 4 Trillion Dollars Would Not Borrow 100+ Billion Dollars at Interest Rates Like Today's
Many headlines perpetuate the lie Microsoft had just 2 waves of layoffs
Microsoft is Googlebombing "Linux" While Paying Former News Sites to Publish SPAM
How much lower will IDG sink?
Google as a 'Bullshit Generator' Disguised as Intelligence
It'll probably cause Google to get sued a lot, both by individuals and companies
As Expected, Google in the UK Now Experiments With Slop Instead of Web Search
At this point more people ought to stop and think: Does Google's search engine deserve trust?
The Data You Don't Give Away is Your Advantage
stop sharing data that does not need to be shared
Being Obedient or Doing the Right Thing
The world always changes for the better because of people who think "Outside the Box", not the cogs
Gemini Links 01/08/2025: Happy Hacking Keyboards and New Gemini Arrivals
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 31, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 31, 2025